Connected Workplace

IT’s Role in Influencing Business Success in 2020 and Beyond

Businesses increasingly acknowledge the need to leverage advanced technologies to improve business agility and gain operational efficiencies. The rapidly maturing Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) market is a ‘silver bullet’ for the major challenges posed by globalization and the search for competitive advantage. By 2020, most organizations will be deploying a broad array of best-of-breed, multi-vendor UCC tools.

All the conditions are in place for a perfect storm that will drive business IT and communications towards a Social, Mobile, Collaborative Cloud future. Futuristic technologies will offer a high degree of sophistication while providing employees with the right information at the right place and at the right time.

By 2020, we will have 50 billion “things” connected and a $14.4 trillion Internet of Things (IoT) market and IoT will start to make its way into the office. Early adopters will ensure that everything from supply chains to retail locations will be able to take advantage of data and device tracking, remote monitoring and control, and tight integration to revolutionize business processes.

Trending Now

From Around the Web: Connected Workplace

By 2020, IT departments will expect employees to own and use their own mobile devices, including smart phones, tablets, and wearable technology like Google Glass, for work purposes.

This will save them some money on capital investments in devices and software, but they will need to formally determine how and when to support such tools, and develop contractual agreements regarding their use. Ultimately, the support costs may equal or outweigh the savings.

While listening to the various technology, product, and service updates from Windstream at their recent analyst summit, I was reminded of an old adage:
“Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath.”

Businesses have to focus on delivering excellent Customer Experiences to grow and survive. But they should prioritize on ensuring product and service quality first then on customer service and support and voice of customer.

As collaboration analyst I spend a lot of time in online meetings. The variety of platforms I use, as well as the topics and size of the meetings I attend, greatly impact my user experience. This is a brief summer of my user experiences.

Our goal is to help vendors to stay close to customers, end users to gain a competitive advantage, suppliers/distributors to stay abreast of the changes in technologies that impact them, and business and IT leaders to move ahead of the curve.